November 30, 2009

8 Reasons Why #GoogleWave May (or May Not) Kill E-Mail

Claude Baudoin recently became an independent consultant in Information Technology and Knowledge Management, after 35 years as an industry practitioner of those disciplines. Most recently, he was IT and KM Advisor at Schlumberger, the leading global oilfield services company. As owner and principal consultant at cébé IT and Knowledge Management, he helps clients put in place IT strategies, software roadmaps, knowledge communities and knowledge retention processes, and manage their IT innovation processes and portfolios.

Every time a new collaboration medium has entered the scene, we’ve been faced with an increasingly difficult choice of what to use. In fact, we usually don’t make that choice consciously, or very well (how many times have you discovered in the evening an e-mail that was sent at 11:30 to tell you of the change of location of your 12:00 lunch?)

Google Wave merges e-mail, instant messaging (IM), and wikis. It no longer matter what “style” you use to start the conversation, it can migrate seamlessly as the wave develops. You can start with alternating individual “blips” (like e-mail replies, just a little easier on the eyes), then decide that you should all edit one of the blips, making it a joint effort, like a wiki entry. And when you do that, you might suddenly see one of the other participants typing in real-time, and you naturally move into an IM-like mode of conversation. And so on. You need to see it to believe how powerful this is.

2 – Persistence.

Once you start a wave, it persists and accumulates information. An IM conversation is typically lost once it ends. In e-mail, the information accumulation is by virtue of threaded replies, but there are three annoying issues: if two people reply to your e-mail at the same time, there isn’t a single message containing all three contributions; the thread needs to be read from bottom to top to be intelligible; and e-mail client idiosyncrasies, especially when it comes to wrapping lines, means that many contributions appear totally messed up once they have been quoted multiple times. Wave shows you each blip where it belongs, decorated with the avatar of its author, with “collapse/expand” buttons to facilitate navigation.

3 – Gadgets.

You can add a “gadget,” which is a Web part, to a Wave. They can be silly, entertaining in a social sense (adding a dynamically updated weather report for each participant’s city), or profoundly useful to an enterprise (the SAP Gravity tool is a collaborative business process modeling tool packaged as a Wave gadget). Some Wave gadgets will certainly evolve to become complete collaboration applications. For example, since Google offers the Google Voice service, Wave will probably become a platform for web conferencing too.

4 – Wave is social.

When you add people to a Wave, you are instantly creating a small ad-hoc community. Just like people are begging their friends for a Wave invitation during the beta-test period, people will want to join some popular waves. When you add a new participant, he or she can immediately review all the previous discussions (using the great “playback” feature of Wave), which serves as an “induction rite” into the club. Participants in a Wave will probably feel more “invested” in the subject than if they had just been CC’ed on an e-mail thread already started. When you invite a new person into a Wave, you often feel like you’re making introductions at a party, and your profile can be seen by the other participants.

But, at the same time…

5 – Wave is complex.

The initial mechanics of Wave are not that complex, but the process of finding and adding people, the choices about whether to add a reply at the end of a wave or edit an existing blip, how to find a useful widget (you currently add them by URL, and multiple grass-roots directory sites are emerging to provide catalogs, which is going to be very confusing), are all obstacles to adoption. The product needs to mature a lot before it will be easy to adopt by the average, non-geek, current e-mail user.

6 – Security and confidentiality concerns.

Wave is “in the cloud” (hosted by Google) and this will be seen as a huge risk for enterprises. There is a confidentiality issue, and also the risk that important information might be lost. Enterprises will want a solution they can host internally, as most do for e-mail or Sharepoint. Selling and supporting an enterprise solution is probably not the route Google wants to take. This might eventually limit the use of the tool in a corporate context.

7 – You don’t need Wave to kill e-mail!

Many younger people don’t use e-mail anymore. They find it too cumbersome, full of spam, lacking in immediacy. Instead, they already “micro-communicate” using Twitter, Facebook status updates, and direct text messages. They want the unit of communication to become smaller, not larger (a Wave can grow up to be an entire months-long conversation between dozens of people).

8 – Old habits die hard.

The final obstacle to the uptake of Wave is good old cultural inertia. I started using e-mail in 1980, but I still know some people (usually older) who don’t use it and don’t want to. So in spite of the convergence that Wave promises, it will probably not displace e-mail, IM, and wikis completely, at least not for a long time. But it is a very interesting development, and you should experiment with it, and make up your own mind.

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8 Reasons Why #GoogleWave May (or May Not) Kill E-Mail

Claude Baudoin recently became an independent consultant in Information Technology and Knowledge Management, after 35 years as an industry practitioner of those disciplines. Most recently, he was IT and KM Advisor at Schlumberger, the leading global oilfield services company. As owner and principal consultant at cébé IT and Knowledge Management, he helps clients put in place IT strategies, software roadmaps, knowledge communities and knowledge retention processes, and manage their IT innovation processes and portfolios.

Every time a new collaboration medium has entered the scene, we’ve been faced with an increasingly difficult choice of what to use. In fact, we usually don’t make that choice consciously, or very well (how many times have you discovered in the evening an e-mail that was sent at 11:30 to tell you of the change of location of your 12:00 lunch?)

Google Wave merges e-mail, instant messaging (IM), and wikis. It no longer matter what “style” you use to start the conversation, it can migrate seamlessly as the wave develops. You can start with alternating individual “blips” (like e-mail replies, just a little easier on the eyes), then decide that you should all edit one of the blips, making it a joint effort, like a wiki entry. And when you do that, you might suddenly see one of the other participants typing in real-time, and you naturally move into an IM-like mode of conversation. And so on. You need to see it to believe how powerful this is.

2 – Persistence.

Once you start a wave, it persists and accumulates information. An IM conversation is typically lost once it ends. In e-mail, the information accumulation is by virtue of threaded replies, but there are three annoying issues: if two people reply to your e-mail at the same time, there isn’t a single message containing all three contributions; the thread needs to be read from bottom to top to be intelligible; and e-mail client idiosyncrasies, especially when it comes to wrapping lines, means that many contributions appear totally messed up once they have been quoted multiple times. Wave shows you each blip where it belongs, decorated with the avatar of its author, with “collapse/expand” buttons to facilitate navigation.

3 – Gadgets.

You can add a “gadget,” which is a Web part, to a Wave. They can be silly, entertaining in a social sense (adding a dynamically updated weather report for each participant’s city), or profoundly useful to an enterprise (the SAP Gravity tool is a collaborative business process modeling tool packaged as a Wave gadget). Some Wave gadgets will certainly evolve to become complete collaboration applications. For example, since Google offers the Google Voice service, Wave will probably become a platform for web conferencing too.

4 – Wave is social.

When you add people to a Wave, you are instantly creating a small ad-hoc community. Just like people are begging their friends for a Wave invitation during the beta-test period, people will want to join some popular waves. When you add a new participant, he or she can immediately review all the previous discussions (using the great “playback” feature of Wave), which serves as an “induction rite” into the club. Participants in a Wave will probably feel more “invested” in the subject than if they had just been CC’ed on an e-mail thread already started. When you invite a new person into a Wave, you often feel like you’re making introductions at a party, and your profile can be seen by the other participants.

But, at the same time…

5 – Wave is complex.

The initial mechanics of Wave are not that complex, but the process of finding and adding people, the choices about whether to add a reply at the end of a wave or edit an existing blip, how to find a useful widget (you currently add them by URL, and multiple grass-roots directory sites are emerging to provide catalogs, which is going to be very confusing), are all obstacles to adoption. The product needs to mature a lot before it will be easy to adopt by the average, non-geek, current e-mail user.

6 – Security and confidentiality concerns.

Wave is “in the cloud” (hosted by Google) and this will be seen as a huge risk for enterprises. There is a confidentiality issue, and also the risk that important information might be lost. Enterprises will want a solution they can host internally, as most do for e-mail or Sharepoint. Selling and supporting an enterprise solution is probably not the route Google wants to take. This might eventually limit the use of the tool in a corporate context.

7 – You don’t need Wave to kill e-mail!

Many younger people don’t use e-mail anymore. They find it too cumbersome, full of spam, lacking in immediacy. Instead, they already “micro-communicate” using Twitter, Facebook status updates, and direct text messages. They want the unit of communication to become smaller, not larger (a Wave can grow up to be an entire months-long conversation between dozens of people).

8 – Old habits die hard.

The final obstacle to the uptake of Wave is good old cultural inertia. I started using e-mail in 1980, but I still know some people (usually older) who don’t use it and don’t want to. So in spite of the convergence that Wave promises, it will probably not displace e-mail, IM, and wikis completely, at least not for a long time. But it is a very interesting development, and you should experiment with it, and make up your own mind.